George Clooney compares Trump’s America to the McCarthy era: “I do think it is worse now”

Celebrated actor George Clooney is currently starring in a Broadway version of ‘Good Night and Good Luck’. In it, Clooney portrays the historical figure Edward R. Murrow, the veteran journalist who was a vocal critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigations in the 1950s.

The play is an examination of the role that the media plays in the world of politics and this latest iteration was described by Clooney as a response to the actions of President Donald Trump.

Clooney, a well publicised Democrat spoke to CNN on the set of the play and spoke about the parallels of politics in the 50s and now.

Clooney stated: “Although McCarthyism was bad, it wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive as it is right now, the kind of fear that you see kind of stretching through law firms and universities, you think it’s worse now than McCarthyism.

I do think it is worse now, although there is one caveat that kind of gets ignored when people talk about this, which is, when I was a kid, we did duck and cover drills. So overriding all of this was the threat of nuclear annihilation.

It was a big deal, I mean, we were pretty sure we were going to all dive a nuclear bomb somewhere along the way. So that always kind of rode on top of the McCarthyism of it all.

What’s fun about doing the play is it reminds people that you know that we have been through difficult times challenging times, and that we survived as a country and we do find our better angels along the way it takes a minute, you know, we always do."

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